Remembering the Bones (7 page)

Ally and I had never heard such a fuss. But long before the Prince made his public declaration, I was enamoured of
The Princess Elizabeth Gift Book
, with its plethora of princesses. The illustrations were of girls entirely unlike Ally and me, and this might have been the attraction. They wore cream-coloured
dresses with flowing skirts, their laps strewn with pink roses. There were drawings of bears and dolls and giant puddings. Both Ally and I read and reread the stories and poems, and silently studied the illustrations. Each time Ally closed the book, she returned to her drawings of snow. When I closed the book, I felt as if I had travelled to other lands.

Come and change, come and change

Into anything you will

I recited the lines when we were outside. I loved make-believe, to a point, until it interfered with my practical side. Genes which I believe Case has inherited. Ally told me, long after we’d grown up, that she still experiences a physical sensation when she thinks about our days reading the
Gift Book
, a deep sense of dreaminess and longing.

I
’ve slept again. I dreamed of Lazarus, of water dripping from a tap. Has an hour passed? A minute? My body is tightening, shrinking from the cold. Clouds lie on their backs like sullen bears. How do they stay aloft? Grand Dan sat in her chair on Sundays with her Bible on her lap and read, “He that observeth the wind shall not sow, and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.”

But what is this? Tears?

Rain on my face. Soft, and oh how welcome. A gift from the sky. It must not be wasted, not a drop. I’ve tried not to allow myself to dwell on thirst but now I can admit how little hope I’ve had, how parched I’ve been. Hold out my good palm, suck my fingers, scrabble for a dry, downed leaf, a blade of last year’s grass, suck the edge of my sweater. A crazy woman I am. When I grope and scrape with my hand, bits of shale loosen around me like handfuls of pennies. But my fingers are wet, my sleeve holds moisture. And I am thankful.

Little drops of water, little grains of sand.

How things fly into my muddled brain. I’d heard this recited by Grand Dan at home, and one morning at school I tried to convince Miss Grinfeld that the line was a sentence. She was teaching nouns, banging her pointer and chanting “Person Place or Thing!” and making the class repeat after her, “Person Place or Thing!” She did this for three consecutive days, telling us that the chant would never leave our heads. For the rest of our lives, we would always be able to identify a noun.

But
my
words, she argued, after asking me to construct a sentence, did not make a sentence at all. My words had no predicate. She stood over my desk.

I resisted. Nothing she said could persuade me to understand the meaning of the word
predicate.
She gave up and turned to the other students. I looked at her back and silently rolled off my tongue,
Little drops of water, little grains of sand.
I loved the sound, loved the line. Sadly, it did not have a predicate and therefore was not a sentence. I did not like Miss Grinfeld that day. I gave up the soothing sound and went home after school and opened
Gray’s Anatomy
and stared at the ghoulish throat that resembled my teacher.

Miss Grinfeld had every country child in her grip for eight years. She filled us with warnings about stepping on rusty nails and the threat of lockjaw. I lived through a mercifully brief period of being terrified that my jaw would clamp shut through no fault of my own and that no one would be able to pry it open, not even to give me water. She did spot checks of our health habits, made us confess what we had eaten for breakfast and admit whether or not we’d brushed our teeth before we walked to school. While we were eating lunch at our desks,
she wandered between rows and peered into lunch buckets and honey pails into which were tucked roast-beef-and-radish sandwiches, or scrambled eggs on four slices of bread. In late spring, when we ran out of jam at home, Ally and I watched in dismay on the days Grand Dan prepared our lunches. We exchanged glances that meant “Sugar-sandwich day” and looked on glumly while she dampened her homemade bread with milk and sprinkled brown sugar between the slices. By the time lunch hour came around, the sugar had dried, and it scattered in every direction as we lifted our sandwiches to our mouths. Miss Grinfeld walked past, her chin defining a circle that followed the pattern of brown dots. It was humiliation of the worst sort; our dresses were speckled from neck to waist. We never spoke of this to Grand Dan.

During health class, I did not let on to Miss Grinfeld that our mother could faint at will, because I was certain she would call this a family peculiarity, like being born with lumpy cheeks. Our teacher sat erect in her straight-backed chair and described generations of chinless families, implying some sort of bad behaviour. She told us not to let our bottom jaw hang open because doing this made a person look stunned, as if gorilla laughter would spew forth. We were quick to pull up our chins in class, but when we were out of earshot in the schoolyard we drooped our jaws and forced chortles from our throats.

Every spring, Miss Grinfeld stood behind her desk and declared that this was the day the bees began to swarm. She taught us to be suspicious of adults who cooled their tea in their saucer before drinking—something Uncle Fred did every time he visited, though I did not betray him. I also said nothing about him wearing a freshly pressed shirt to bed every night, one that he had to iron himself.

Before we arrived at school each winter morning, Miss Grinfeld had already placed a cod liver oil capsule in the pencil groove beside the hole in our desk that held the inkwell. We were required to swallow the fishy-tasting capsule before the day began, and she stood in front of the big boys and made them open their mouths in case they’d stored it in their cheeks to spit out when her back was turned.

In our last year, before she sent us off to the town high school in Wilna Creek, she insisted that during the month of May we memorize an entire Shakespearean play, even though this was not on the senior curriculum. She alternated year by year between
Julius Caesar
and
Macbeth.
In my final year, it was
Macbeth
’s turn, even though I had learned
Julius Caesar
by paying attention to the seniors’ recitations the year before. In fact, for one month of the school year, every child in our one-room school could recite at least some roles, line for line. That we often did not know what we were learning was of no consequence. The truth is, most of us loved the sound of the parts we memorized and, for a few short weeks, these were shouted out in the schoolyard at recess.

But
Little drops of water, little grains of sand
did not have a predicate and was not eligible to be a sentence.

Part of me is dry; the branches link to protect. I’m familiar now with their pattern, a soft and purposeful webbing. That small bit of water has revived my spirits. Even so, my tongue is stuck to itself, my gums and lips cracking. I’ll raise my sleeve again and suck its dampness. I must collect more drops. The sweater will absorb more if I pull back the coat. But I don’t want to freeze. The temperature could fall and I might not be rescued before nightfall. My face is in the open, but I still have a way to go.

I hear a car on the road above and realize I’ve been listening to the sound of tires on wet pavement. Fellow humans, so close, what comfort. Maybe it’s Pete from the cul-de-sac at the end of our street, or maybe Pete’s wife. Pete walks in the ravine, but it’s still early, only April. I have no way of attracting attention. I’m out of sight. Invisible. Too far down. The flesh will fall from my bones and I’ll become a female version of Hubley the skeleton. I’ll be here all summer and fall. Snow will cover me, and Ally will draw a long bony digit pointing through a crust of white. No, she won’t. Because I’ll be out of here by then.

Cover your head and neck.

If only I had a blanket to pull over my head. I’ve nothing to cover myself with. It’s the cold that needles away at my flesh, a slow, steady stitch. I’m lying out in the rain. I don’t deserve this. And I’m crying, a wasted effort, I know.

Where’s your backbone? You’ve sucked your bit of water. Keep your mind alert. Follow a thread. Move your body again.

If I could listen to music, I’d feel better. When Django played, he was always hurrying. Plinky-fast, a reassuring beat. He played at out-of-control speed, as if his music accompanied not body, but spirit. It was as if he knew he had to move quickly if he was to squeeze in everything there was to do.

Never mind Django. Drink. Take in every drop you find.

I
’m seizing, involuntarily. I have to clench and unclench my fingers, painful or not. I have fought off arthritis for years, even though I’m frequently reminded that muscles and bones have tricks of their own. After Harry died, while I listened to jazz in the evenings, I pulled at my fingers, opened and closed my fists, tried to keep my hands from tightening.

Metacarpus. Carpus. Pisiform—in the wrist—named for its likeness to a pea. When I found this in
Gray’s
and showed it to Ally, the name made her blurt with laughter. We weren’t allowed to say pisiform in the house; it was deemed to be an indecent bone. That’s the kind of family we had. Our bones supported us, but some were not to be mentioned.

Until my car dropped off a cliff, my bones gave me wondrous support. Like the rubber jar rings that held up the brown-ribbed stockings we wore to school. Did we really wear those around our thighs? It’s hard to believe. It’s a wonder our legs weren’t gangrenous by the time we were ten. Phil
and Grand Dan pulled at the flat red rings, softening them up until they could be stretched into garters. Ally and I rolled them over our feet and worked them up our legs, and walked around all day with lumpy circles beneath our skirts. Did we have toothpick legs?

Because of falling sales during the Depression, Phil had begun to work at the store in town, three days a week, alongside Mr. Holmes. She was worried about the long hours he was putting in and did her best to absorb some of the workload. She darted around the store, moving quickly between counters stacked with neat bolts of cloth. She had always liked to sew and, when business was slow, she slipped easily into the duties of filling order sheets for flannels and unbleached cottons, drapery material, millinery felt, mourning veils, hat wire and trimming. Mr. Holmes sold sundries, too: ribbons and threads, needles and pins, hooks and eyes, buttons and cotton tape measures. After Phil began to help out at the store, she ordered garter elastic and that put an end to rubber jar rings around our thighs.

Phil was enjoying her days in town, and occasionally stopped in at bazaars or rummage sales when she took a break from the store. One day she brought home a slightly tattered book called
Queen of Home.
For a time this rested on the lower shelf of the oak table in the parlour, the one that held the glass-leafed tree. Tree on top, book on the bottom. Grand Dan laughed when she saw the wine-coloured cover with gold embossing—she had known the book in her youth. It had been published in the 1880s, which Ally and I believed to be the dark ages. We had no idea what was still to come in our own century.

The book was intended for women who reigned over their households, and I suppose that described the combination of Grand Dan and Phil in one house. I came home from school one day to find thick curtains hung across every open doorway. Phil had read a chapter that said all doorways leading to a hall should be curtained with double velour. Velour had not sold well at the store, so she’d tucked bolts of it into the car and brought it home and hemmed it and hung it up. Grand Dan agreed to the change because she did not want icy drafts in winter causing us to become ill with “the shivering fits.” She kept her own supply of turpentine and goose grease in the pantry for those occasions.

Ally and I were required to do more housework now that Phil worked at the store, and this meant that we had to stay inside to learn to appreciate the power of elbow grease. As seriously as Grand Dan doled out the chores, we made light of them. When we dusted, we sang. If we were told to wax and polish floors, we wrapped thick rags around our slippers and shuffled across hardwood, bumping hips every time we made a pass around the room, batting at the velour that blocked the doorways.

At night in our bedroom, Ally sometimes read aloud from
Queen of Home
, which was about the proper way for a young couple to set up house. She had not yet assigned the housework duties for the villa in Boca, and we were determined that neither of us would be stuck with a mop and bucket in hand.

I knew some of the dialogue by heart: “
I hate housekeeping, answers the young wife.”

Ally piped up: “
Pardon me, please, but if this be the case, you have no right to marry at all.
”

This made us laugh out loud, even though we were beginning to think that perhaps we did want the right to “marry at all.” Not then, but someday.

Grand Dan did not help out at the store, but she kept up the garden in the yard. When we came home after school in late spring and early summer, she was often outside, planting or watering or tending to the wagon-wheel garden that encircled her rose bushes. In no time at all she had us both weeding, one of our after-school chores. The garden was important to all of us. We were living through the Depression; there were few extras on the table, despite our parents doing everything possible to keep the store running and money coming in.

Ally and I tried our own hand at being providers, the summer after our mother began to work in town. In early June, unexpected company dropped in late one Sunday afternoon and had to be invited for supper. There was no extra vegetable to serve with the meat and potatoes that we always had. Butterbeans weren’t ready; lettuce had not come up. From the kitchen window, I watched Grand Dan go outside and kneel between rows, where she began to tug up her tiny baby carrots. While she was destroying her own garden, I thought of her reciting: “A time to plant, and a time to pluck that which is planted.” I was certain I had seen her wipe her eyes. A half-hour later, when the carrots were served—small and stubby as knuckle joints—I refused to eat a single one.

Because of seeing Grand Dan weep, I devised a plan later in the summer and persuaded Ally to join me. Peas were grown on the farm past Mott’s and, at harvest time, the wagons had to travel the main dirt road to get to the canning factory. We
stood in the veranda until we saw a team of horses approach, the wagon behind stacked with peas as high as a load of hay. We ran out to the road and waved up to the driver and a second man who sat on the wagon seat beside him. A hot dry wind was blowing, and there was a good deal of noise from the rattle of the wheels. We began to chase the wagon, and ran alongside, ducking down, grabbing at vines, dropping them as we ran. We were hot from running, and laughing from the sheer craziness of stealing. The men could see us perfectly well, and one of them craned his head back and shouted down at us from the wagon, but we couldn’t hear because of the noise. Ally was doubled over. I looked at her hands full of pea vines, her wrists drooping, and I thought of the wrist bone in
Gray’s
that was likened to a pea and I shouted “Pisiform!” and Ally understood and shouted back.

“Pisiform!” we yelled at the top of our lungs. “Pisiform! Pisiform!”

We hollered into the hot wind and aimed our indecent bone at the wagon, and the men looked back and smiled and waved. We stopped running and laughed and laughed and tried to catch our breath and retraced our steps along the road to pick up the vines we’d dropped. Each of us had a huge armload and we carried the tangled mess around to the back of the shed, where we separated pods and chucked peas into a bucket, eating while we worked. We were not prepared for Grand Dan’s reaction when we carried the peas triumphantly to the house. “They fall off the wagon anyway—sometimes,” we said, in our own defence. “And the men didn’t mind—they just laughed at us.” We did not mention hurling our indecent bone.

But that was not good enough. Our punishment was to sit outside on the stoop and read the Ten Commandments aloud. Even so, the five of us dined that night on every stolen pea. And good-for-nothings that we were, in the bottom of the serving bowl, we left an extravagant puddle of melted butter.